My original vision for the game was to keep it as simple as possible. I view Swords for Hire as a gateway game. Something that anyone can pick up and learn fairly quickly even if they aren’t familiar with board games.
For the first year of playtesting there were no character abilities. All the characters were the same, just pieces that could be manipulated freely. I play tested with a variety of people. I played with gamers and non-gamers. Overwhelmingly the feedback I got from non-gamers was very positive. They felt like they could grasp the game and their weren’t too many rules. The feedback that I kept getting from gamers was that it was fun, but they wanted more. They were happy with the game as it was, but they would say that it would be even better if it had more.
I got a lot of different suggestions on what cool things could be added to make the game “even cooler”. One that kept coming up though was character abilities. I started asking my playtesters about character abilities and pretty much every gamer liked the idea of character abilities. Something to add another layer of strategy to the game.
Without character abilities there was no strategic reason to pick one mercenary over another one, until you started guessing which one other players had paid off. Adding abilities actually made it easier to pick which mercenaries you wanted to back in the beginning of the game because it gave you a frame of reference as to their value. People could think of potential strategies using each character.
At this point the plan is to provide character abilities as an additional rule. The core game can be played just fine without them. I will recommend that the first time someone plays the game they play without character abilities. This will allow them to grasp the core mechanics of the game before adding additional complexity. Once one or two games have been played they will be wanting something more, that is where the character abilities come in.